Probability: The Science of Uncertainty with Applications to Investments, Insurance, and Engineering

The quality and level of the writing are excellent. It covers all the required probability topics, and emphasizes certain topics that are not usually emphasized in other texts. Some of these topics are conditional probability; distributional form of Law of Total Probability and Bayes Theorem; conditional expectation; limited moments; mixed probability distributions; survival distributions; hazard or mortality functions; special continuous distributions used in survival analysis (Weibull, Pareto, etc.); compound Poisson and other compound distributions. All but the last chapter on option pricing would be required reading for Exam 1, and the last chapter useful for Exam 2.

A very useful feature of this textbook is that in Chapters 5 (Special Discrete Distributions) and 6 (Special Continuous Distributions) the distribution theory is very clearly outlined. For example, relationship to other distributions, distribution of iid sums, limiting distributions, etc. are clearly stated and summarized. In addition to Exam 1, this text will also be valuable as a reference to study for Exam 4.

Students who would have difficulty with the level of this presentation will also have difficulty with SOA Exam 1.


Excellent for SOA exam P   May 26, 2005
Actuary Student (The cradle of American Independence)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful

I used this book to study for SOA exam P and loved it! If you already have some background in statistics and probability, this is the book to go. It will fill in the blanks left by your average school textbook and give you the nesessary coverage of the exam material.


Good for self-study   April 2, 2007
Anastasia (Staten Island, NY)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

I used this textbook as my main study material for the SOA/CAS P/1 exam. I found it to be well-written and understandable. I have some background in calculus and probability (long-forgotten college courses). I'm hanging on to it for future reference. It's actually possible to learn the material from the book all on your own. All in all, one of the better textbooks out there.


I use this book almost every day   July 20, 2006
Neurasthenic (New York City, New York)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I appreciate that many people will be buying this because it has been endorsed by the Society of Actuaries. My review is for those who aren't being compelled to use the book in exam prep. I find "The Science of Uncertainty" to be the most consistently useful of the statistics texts in my office. The examples are clear, it has the right equations, and it's well organized.

Some people here are complaining of inaccuracies but they provide no examples and, frankly, I've never noticed a problem.

I like that authors provided an appendix explaining how to manipulate the distributions they discuss in the book using Mathematica. This was not new to me, but I can imagine it would save others some headaches.


A hard book to digest   January 17, 2005
C. Towner (Manassas VA)
6 out of 11 found this review helpful

As a statistics graduate, I found it hard to understand this book. There are not many friendly examples to help the readers to understand the concepts, even with the help of solution manual. There are some mistakes too.